I really wanted to be the oddball in this situation for once. I wanted to give “Lift” the ol’ college try and see if I can come out the other side, saying there was something, anything worth of merit to this rip-off porporee to where I didn’t come off like a complete waste of time.
Alas, it was not to be. I’m almost embarrassed that I gave this a chance in the first place.
F. Gary Gray is known for his slick, atmospheric thrillers but he’s also no stranger to believable action capers, so it’s really disquieting how his attempt at mimicking the Ocean’s Eleven style does not work. So much, A LOT of procedural buildup for what we see leans a lot on familiar tropes and it feels more like he’s following a blueprint than actively using his own knowledge and expertise to make anything here stand out.
So the actions sequences are drab and repetitive with so much finicky and poorly rendered CGI, every line of dialogue is an echo of better written ones from days past, what constitutes for thrills and excitement is just blandly zippy editing that feels deliberately chaotic to a fault and while Bernard Jasper’s camerawork is purely functional, it all ranges from basic medium to establishing to wide shots with very few deviations and the few that we get are far too short.
And that’s not even going into how this low-grade TV visual aesthetic just overexposes how lethargic the production design is, while simultaneously making it look over-polished and fake as hell. A few short snippets of Venice and Brussels aren’t gonna change how most of this supposed globe trotting adventure is shot almost entirely on soundstages, making every single set-piece look and feel inexplicably empty.
Picking on Kevin Hart is not fun for me, you guys know this. Despite his penchant for comedy, the man has proven he can be a solid dramatic actor depending on the project; not here. He’s not really convincing as a charismatic con-man and it’s not for a lack of trying. Honestly, most of these cast members aren’t very convincing either, due to a palpable disconnect in chemistry.
The characters they’re stuck with is arguably just as bad between formulaic portrayals and the villains being clichéd stereotypes.
We all know how the basic structure of these heists movies work: there’s planning, getting together a team of disparate individuals, introducing the ticking-clock nature of the job, a getaway, the dogged pursuit by the law, the unravelling and popping bottles over the Riviera. But what are the three things most of these heist movies insist on always delivering on: SCOPE, SCALE, and STAKES, all of which are uniformly absent from this garish simulacrum.
Everything about this plot is largely predictable from the outset. For instance, the moment we’re introduced to the plane, it's almost too easy to foresee how its showcased features play pivotal roles later in the film; it telegraphs its intentions early on, making it simple to discern allies from adversaries but also making it nigh-impossible for anybody to care about whether this team accomplishes their task or not. The litany of ludicrous setups for said heist liters the following 104 minutes with potential for elevation but the work put in to emulate the results is too safe and takes itself too seriously to garner any positive reactions. Not only that, but I JUST realized this plot is just a reworked copy of another F. Gary Gray movie from 2003 only with a different format; sure, the theft is ambitious and somewhat entertaining with a couple of modern gimmicks to make it different but it's just too unrealistic to be believable and the gaping plot holes only make it worse.
You can literally count down the number of SECONDS before this movie lurches into such tacky unreality at the beginning, especially since the entirety of this heist being centered around an NFT increasing in value already dates Daniel Kunka's script by a full two and half years.
Technically, yes, it doesn’t try to trick you into thinking it’s more than it lets on but that doesn’t really make it any less worse if it still sucks, does it? At best, it’s just a cliched-ridden pale imitation of better films and at worst, it’s another sobering reminder of the eroding, ineffectual, substandard quality of Netflix’s attempt at an star-studded action library.
Ending this with a joke like “This movie doesn’t have enough room to get off the ground” feels too easy to spell out for the peanut gallery, cause this doesn’t feel like a movie.
